In 1967, American physicist Steven Weinberg proposed a unification theory — that weak and electromagnetic interactions, long thought to be two distinct forces, are instead two characterizations of the same fundamental force. He said later that the idea occurred to him out of the blue as he was driving to work at MIT. Now known as the electroweak theory, his eureka moment and the work that followed, explaining and confirming it, won Weinberg the Nobel Prize in 1979. The honor was shared with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam, who conducted independent but related research leading to the same conclusion. In a rather remarkable coincidence, Glashow and Weinberg had been high school classmates decades earlier at the Bronx High School of Science.

Electroweak theory is a cornerstone of the present-day standard model of elementary-particle physics, providing a comprehensive illustration of the basic units of matter and their behavior, and fits nearly perfectly with virtually all the pertinent data collected by experimental physics. Weinberg has also contributed respected research in cosmology, gravity theory, high energy behavior of quantum field theory, infrared photons, particle physics, pion scattering, quantum field theory, supersymmetry, symmetry breaking, and technicolor theory (which has nothing to do with movies).

Author of books:Gravitation and Cosmology (1971, physics)The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (1977, popular science)The Discovery of Subatomic Particles (1983, physics)Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics (1987, physics; with Richard Feynman)The Theory of Subatomic Particles, Gravitation and Cosmology (1990, physics)Dreams of a Final Theory (1993, popular science)The Quantum Theory of Fields (1995-97, textbook; two volumes)Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries (2001, popular science)Glory and Terror: The Coming Nuclear Danger (2004, physics)Cosmology (2008, physics)Lake Views: This World and the Universe (2010, popular science)